


defenders.

by shariling



Category: The Last of Us, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 15:10:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17123702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shariling/pseuds/shariling
Summary: “Shiro?”It’s him. Handsome as the day Keith met him. But there’s something wrong in his stance—his usual calm demeanor exchanged for something taunt and uncomfortable. His shoulders buckled, his eyes wild, his face—“Shiro, you’re covered in blood.”





	defenders.

**Author's Note:**

> this is a tlou sheith au that i've had in my head for awhile, and i really wanted to write out. i have lots of ideas i'd like to do so pls let me know if you're interested! this first chapter is a little rough, but it's mostly just setting the stage for the rest of it. 
> 
> a very quick shout out to the shiro to my keith who helped me plan this au - my lovely isla, who basically let me take all her ideas and write them in a much less eloquent way. thank u always!!!!!
> 
> if you're feeling up to it please say hello to me on twitter @ [enjolyas](https://twitter.com/enjolyas) i am very lonely and shy. onto the fic!

Shiro’s late.

He’s late sometimes. Out for drinks after work or tied up in a problem that keeps him clocking in overtime hours. But. He’s never—this late. It’s well past two a.m. and Keith had gone to sleep before he got home hours ago, tucking in Nova with a gentle coo and a merry rendition of _Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star_ that always makes her burble with an infant’s form of contentment. He tried calling, but he didn’t get an answer, until he followed the rings of Shiro’s abandoned cell into their dining room. Odd behavior, but Keith can’t afford panic. He’s sure everything will be alright, probably. It usually is. 

He’s woken up by Nova’s tears, and quickly collects her into his arms, bouncing her with a tempered step, up and down and up and down. For a newborn, she has thick hair, and Keith slides his fingers through it, shushing her softly.

“You’re worried about Daddy too, huh?”

She’s a couple months old, which means Keith has since learned how to hold her and how to silence those cries into the wide-eyed look of an infant who sees the world in the way you frame it. Shiro and Keith have done their best to make it an image of love—their home is their sanctuary, and it houses the little fractions of themselves that other people don’t often get to see. The stars they painted on the ceiling of Nova’s room because city lights dull them out in the real world, the model airplanes in the front room they’d built together on a third and fourth date. There are little love notes on the fridge that they leave each other when they’re ships in the harbor, each tending to work and barely getting moments together. They’ve taken this house and made it their home, in every step of the place. 

“He’ll be alright. Don’t worry.”

It’s funny, when you’re talking to a baby. She doesn’t need the reassuring, Keith does. He looks her in the eyes as if expecting her to agree, and the bubble of spit that comes out in response is about as close to acknowledgement as he expects he’ll get. 

He wanders through the house, Nova in hand, mindlessly examining the life they’ve built together. Dirty dishes in the sink, matching NASA shirts thrown haphazardly around the sofa from a heated romp that ended less in orgasms, and more in Nova wailing from a woken nap. Keith is padding into the kitchen to find one of the dozens of pacifiers he _knows_ he has laying around but can never seen to find when he needs them, when a loud boom vibrates the house from some distance away. Keith smoothly slides to the window, eyebrows knitted, to see a large bloom of smoke rising from a skyscraper in early downtown. He cups the back of Nova’s head as if to protect her from it, keeping her face solidly on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

You have to be strong for your kid. Everything wrong right now and every fear seizing icy hot grips on all of Keith’s nerve endings is a back burner, unimportant. What matters is keeping Nova safe. He’s about to curl up with her on the couch before he hears the front door rip open and slam shut, and Keith runs to go see—

“Shiro?”

It’s him. Handsome as the day Keith met him. But there’s something wrong in his stance—his usual calm demeanor exchanged for something taunt and uncomfortable. His shoulders buckled, his eyes wild, his face—

“Shiro, you’re covered in blood.”

Keith is doing a good job of not freaking out. He just squints at his husband, clutching Nova to his chest. Shiro shakes his head, eyes watery, as if to say _you don’t want to know._

“Keith,” he says, shaking his head again. Belatedly, notices a gun in his hand, that he tucks into the waistband of his pants. “It’s not mine. Go upstairs and get the gun. We have to leave.”

Sometime later, he’ll be amused by how unaffected he is by these demands. Shiro tells him to grab a gun and he just nods his head, handing their child over and into Shiro’s arms, who coddles her like she’s the first breath of fresh air he’s had in days. Keith runs up to their master bedroom, a pathway he could find with his eyes closed and off sensation alone. In the bedside drawer on Shiro’s half of the bed, Keith rummages through the bottom most drawer until his fingers find the unfamiliar clutch of metal sliding against his hand. He has enough time to grab it, and a collection of his most loved knives, before he hears a commotion downstairs—a loud break of glass followed by the sound of Shiro shouting, and Keith can hardly count the milliseconds between him in their bedroom and running back down to find whatever horrors await him.

It's Shiro, pinned by someone—Keith doesn’t know who. He doesn’t think, or care, who. He just lines up the shot and pulls the trigger, the rabid bodily movements of the intruder stilled, until he lifelessly falls to one side. 

It’s their neighbor. Nova is crying, squashed against Shiro’s chest. With the body tossed off, Shiro tends to her cries, holding her as if she’s the only thing in this world keeping him glued together. Keith joins the fray with the stilted movements of a man who’s just killed someone for the first time. The gun is warm and sticky in the palm of his hand, radiating like livewire copper, burning his skin off. He and Shiro used to have fun in the shooting range, and Keith learned to hit the target every time. Bullseye, every time.

“Keith.”

Shiro calls out to him. It’s with a tone of voice that makes Keith think he’s been saying his name for a while, and Keith finally snaps out of his trance with the break of that soft syllable, Shiro saying his name like it didn’t exist before he breathed life into it. Keith shakes his head.

“I’m okay. Let’s get out of here.”

There’s no discussion about it. No question. There’s now a corpse in the place they bought to be their home some years ago, blood so dark it looks black seeping into the carpet they have regularly cleaned, because Keith is frequently clumsy with cans of soda. There’s little sympathy shared between the three of them—Shiro with an armful of baby, Keith with a gun still clenched tight in his hand, and Nova burbling contentedly once her cries are lulled with an anxious murmur of _The Itsy Bitsy Spider_ that Shiro pushes into the soft hairs at the top of her head. They can’t apologize for what’s been done, although Shiro does spare Keith a kiss on his forehead as he hustles out of the house, tugging the two of them back towards the garage. In it, Shiro stalls, sharing glances between his car, and Keith’s motorcycle. 

Keith is staring dazedly down at his hands (gun) but he snaps to attention as Shiro settles on the bike. Knitted brows firmly in place on his forehead, he shakes his head.

“What about Nova?”

“I’ll hold her,” Shiro grunts out, unzipping his jacket to sandwich the baby in closely to his chest. He zips it up but keeps his opposing arm cupped around her small back, revving the engine to life. “Something’s wrong with the world, Keith. We have to get out of here—fast.”

Maybe it hits him, just how terrible all this is. Keith killed that guy. He was awful, and attacking Shiro, and shooting him wasn’t a choice so much as it was instinctive to protective the very foundation of his world, but. He still shot him. Pulled the trigger and landed a spot somewhere in the void between his eyes, where all logic and thought seemed to devolve into _kill, eat, kill._ Keith trades hands with the gun and clenches his fingers in the ghost of the thing, marveled that the twitch of a pointer finger was the difference between life and death for the neighbor who always tended to his garden, while Keith said hello to his dog.

“ _Keith._ ” It’s another booming name, stealing him back into the moment. Shiro is looking at him sternly, worried but harsh, turning bone into steel and soft things into the metal spikes of turbulence. “Listen to me. We’re all going to die if we stay here, so you need to get on this bike and cover me and our daughter’s back. Can you do that?”

If it's a choice between _can and can't_ , Keith knows where he falls, where he always falls when a challenge arises. Still, the few steps he takes towards the bike are among the hardest, the heaviest he's ever made—the weight of the world sits on shoulders too small to man the brunt of it. Even still, it's lighter once he's sitting. Like proximity gives Shiro a little of the burden, like being close reaffirms that Keith has, can, _will_ kill for this man and this little, baby girl, as many times as it takes. Shiro rests his hand briefly on Keith's thigh, squeezing with an intent stare, before the bike takes off and they're driving, speeding towards the freeway. He remembers the first time he introduced Shiro to his bike, his first baby, the hodge podge mess of bastardized motorcycle parts, screwed together with a loving hand and clear knowledge of the inner workings of mechanics.

 _Can it run?_ , Shiro asked, incredulously.

 _Faster than whatever you’re driving_ , Keith had said. 

Now they’re in the race of their lifetimes, surging past the neighborhood their daughter was meant to grow up in, the wayward streets of domesticity that used to bring them on their travels to work, or the grocery store, or the planetarium downtown—a usual date night for the three of them on the weekends when Shiro’s work would allow him a few days of rest before getting back to the grind of NASA based equations, running simulations and figuring out the things that need to be figured out. They’d just reopened their space flight program a month ago. By the end of next year, Shiro was supposed to be up in the stars. Keith made jokes about being a stay at home wife, staying with the baby while his husband went and explored sustainable life in heaven.

Now they’re racing to the interstate to get _out_ of here. They can’t even get on the 45 because traffic is so congested, full of families who all had the same thoughts as them. Shiro straightens, nodding once.

“Alright. Not Dallas.”

Keith knows this tone of his. It’s the same one he wore that one time in the sticky summer they got into a car accident, Shiro fumbling with the dying AC before a car ran a red light and plowed right into them. Keith’s arm was outside the window and whiplash shattered the bone against the metal frame of the car like glass. _I think I broke my arm_ , he remembers saying, and listening to Shiro respond with, _don’t say that. You’re fine, you’re fine._ Needlessly calm in times of panic, a man of solutions instead of lingering on the problems. Not Dallas, fine. There are plenty of other directions to drive in, as long as they don’t stay here. 

Shiro’s about to pull back, but the man in the car just in front of them exits the vehicle and starts yelling at the cars ahead to start moving. It doesn’t take any time at all before one of those— _things_ , those people who aren’t people, to get on him, going for the jugular, tearing his throat out with one sickening _rip_.

Now it’s Shiro’s time to freeze.

“Shiro?” Keith says, patting his side before tugging, insistently on his jacket. “Shiro, time to go!”

It snaps him back into action, and then they’re whipping away from the highway, going somewhere, anywhere, that isn’t here. They’re in downtown Houston when a car—same as that time in the summer, the AC, the _you’re fine, you’re fine_ —comes slamming into the side of the bike. They’ve got some air distance, Shiro tightening the baby close to his chest and Keith tightening Shiro to his, making sure that he’s the force that breaks their landing, making sure the baby is safe, that _his_ baby is safe, that the two of them making it out okay if Keith can’t. He blacks out but not for terribly long, Shiro shaking his shoulders to rise.

“Keith, get up!”

Keith groans and uses Shiro’s arms to help himself. The entire right half of his body is scraped to all hell, and there’s a blood patch on the pavement where the skin on his arm was rubbed raw and bloody.

“I’m fine,” he says, before Shiro can ask. He nods his head towards him. “Nova?”

“Would you believe she’s sleeping?” 

A sudden cry from his chest confirms Keith’s suspicions. She is definitely not napping. But sometimes—rarely—there are things more important than the cries of a daughter tucked against her father’s chest, hot baby breaths hitting his collar, angry baby tears soaking the material of his shirt. The sound of her is drowned out by the general chaos of the city, anyway. Fire rages in store fronts, shattered windows of department stores showing the first signs of looters, so quickly after the world fell right into hell. Car abandoned in the middle of the road, with smeared bloody handprints splattered on the hoods. The corpses are never too far from sight.

The majority of it, though, is just people—people just like them, trying to figure out where to go, what to do. Everyone trying to protect their families, some with their families already shattered, running because their legs don’t know how to stop. People begging, asking for help. People with their arms torn off or gashes in their necks, bleeding out after a few steps running. People, what used to be people, breaking towards them, savagely tackling those still alive to the ground to right that particular stasis. 

Keith cocks his gun, nodding at Shiro.

“You run straight ahead. I’ll cover your 6.”

“Cover the rest of me, too.”

“Aye, aye.”

They take off running, making their best heading towards the highway to find either someone to take pity on them, or make it to the state line where the police are setting up quarantine. They follow a large group a people, but their numbers dwindle in minutes. Keith pulls the trigger five, six, seven times, counting his bullets. Those things are not touching his family. If a healthy person so much as brushes Shiro’s shoulder, they’re losing their fucking head. He will not discriminate between able minded and chaotic—he will just point his gun and fire, the moment his family is put in a threat. 

“There’s too many of them!” Shiro shouts at Keith, backtracking away from a fenced end where the creatures are climbing up the gate, snagging their spoiled flesh on cut wires but not minding the pain of torn skin. Keith shares quick looks around them, making a decision in a split second, gesturing to an alleyway.

“Over here!”

They go running. Shiro leads and Keith follows, but they’re closely trailed by a pack of those things—nine or ten and too many to fight with a limited supply of bullets. Keith forces them all through a restaurant, smashing rotten flesh behind the lock of a door.

“Keep going!”

“What?”

“You heard me,” Keith pants, tone deadly serious with an icy chill that’d freeze the bodies outside with one swoop. Shiro has gotten used to it over time. He steps forward, eyebrows knitted and ready to argue, but Keith turns the gun on him. “You take our daughter and you get to safety, you hear me? I will meet up with you. I can out run these guys.”

Shiro squeezes Nova to his chest, swallowing thickly. Keith knows he has to agree. It’s always been them against the world, against every obstacle that has ever come forth to tear them apart—but now they have Nova, and she has to come first. Shiro clenches his jaw, nodding curtly.

“You’d better meet up with us. Keith,” briefly, he cups a hand on Keith’s cheek, redefining the ice Keith had managed a second ago. Daring him to die. Daring him to see what happens. “Promise me.”

“I’m definitely not dying without you. Not now, not ever.” He offers a short smile, tucking a kiss down on what he can make out of Nova’s head through Shiro’s jacket. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

His touch lingers on Keith’s cheek, and then he’s gone, jogging out towards the border. 

Right. Keith can do this. 

He can hear the hungry sounds of those things just outside the door, scratching their raw fingers against the wood, moaning in search for their appetite feasted. Keith cracks his neck, tucks his pistol in the back of his jeans, and takes out his knife collection. Here goes nothing.

—

He’s covered in blood by the end of it, hands a conglomerate scent of metals and gunpowder, and every time he tries to wipe sticky crimson from his nose, he ends up leaving more in its place. The border isn’t too far and he races towards it, keeping an eye out for Shiro.

“I have a baby with me.”

He hears him before he sees him. Keith slows his jogs up the dirty beat road, eyes peeling until he catches a glimpse of Shiro, face to face with a military man, one arm up in submission. The man has a rifle pointed at him from a few feet away and _oh_. No. Keith doesn’t like this at all.

He takes his gun out as fast as possible, but he and the man still pull their triggers at the same time. Everyone hits the ground together—the soldier, Shiro, their daughter in his shirt.

“Shit!” 

Keith gracelessly clambers over towards them, hands hooking around the thick of his bicep and forcing him on his back, chanting a cacophony of _no no no_ s as he sees the seeping of blood spread across his chest, sinking into his shirt. Keith lifts it, to see the damage, but—

No. No no no.

Shiro stirs, almost unharmed, delirious, unaware. Keith is staring at his stomach, at the _blood_ , eyes wide with horror.

“Keith?”

No no no no no.

He reaches, touches, has to feel it for himself. Nova’s lifeless little foot, sliding softly against the heel of his palm.

Here’s the thing. 

Keith and loss have been next door neighbors since the boardwalk of childhood raised an orphan boy out on the streets. Everyone he’s ever loved has left him, through death or some other means, to the point where Keith just expected he’d live his life alone forever, unattached, without family. It was a problem he and Shiro faced at the start of their relationship—the walls Keith keeps up, the barbed wire fences he has to entrap himself in his own pit of isolation. He likes to think he’s used to loss and what it means to him. He likes to think he’d be stable if Shiro ever left him, because he treats it like an inevitably. Anything more than temporary is just—extra.

Nothing prepares you for the loss of a child.

That funny little girl with stars for eyes, with a goofy little toothless smile that made it seem like the whole world was smiling with her. Like one little heartbeat could rally a whole world of different minded people, from the sheer innocence of one being. Nova was _pure_ , she was starlight and soft, and she wasn’t blood related to either of them, but. She was their daughter. And she reminded him of Shiro, this kind of untouchable beauty, this starkly clean person who Keith would touch with tarred hands, leaving oil slick spills in his wake. Everyday with her was more than he deserved. Everyday—

Shiro is just staring down at her body, not saying anything. Keith is the one who cracks, screaming, falling down to his knees and collecting Shiro’s head to his chest, stifling cries against the back of his head. Shiro doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He stays with the corpse of his daughter in his hands, staring but not looking, hands shaking.

“Nova.” Shiro finally says.

Supernova. The beginning and end of everything.


End file.
